Travis Hyde

Very disappointing after an amazing first installation.

There are some neat moments. The player control feels very, very smooth. The weapon unique move sets are a very interesting way they have given the player more capability to confront their challenges. The less flattering: they made an enormous game and only justified about 20% of the space it takes up. The "legacy" dungeons are great, but the exploration that you must go through in between these areas (the overworld) is very tedious and it feels like each overworld area is large for the purpose of justifying the horse you can ride, but the horse seems to exist just to make the large areas manageable. From Software tried a new approach and I really hope they realize that their strengths are interwoven level design and quality boss challenge. The game is 80% filler in terms of map saturation and seems like out of the 100ish boss encounters, maybe 10 of them are unique (not kidding, even some of the "great bosses" end up at the end of the cookie cutter caves and dungeons a 2nd and 3rd time). Some people will certainly like this aspect of the game, there is a lot of stuff to plow through and if you get excited about having higher weapon scaling numbers (yes standard weapons can go up to +25 now...but the enemy health also goes through the roof, so it is just keeping up with numbers, not allowing you to be extra OP.), lots of bosses to say you beat (and you prefer quantity over quality), then you'll likely dig this. To me, they bit off more than they could chew and it feels a lot like dark souls 2 (tons of bosses, a handful are memorable)